The following is from a British journalist stationed in the
Philippines .. His observations are so hilarious!!!!
This was written in 1999.
Matter of Taste
by Matthew Sutherland
I have now been in this country for over six years, and consider
myself in most respects well assimilated. However, there is one
key step on the road to full assimilation, which I have yet to take,
and that’s to eat BALUT. The day any of you sees me eating balut,
please call immigration and ask them to issue me a Filipino passport.
Because at that point there will be no turning back. BALUT, for those
still blissfully ignorant non-Pinoys out there, is a fertilized duck
egg.
It is commonly sold with salt in a piece of newspaper, much like
English fish and chips, by street vendors usually after dark,
presumably so you can’t see how gross it is. It’s meant to be an aphrodisiac,
although I can’t imagine anything more likely to dispel sexual
desire than crunching on a partially formed baby duck swimming in
noxious fluid. The embryo in the egg comes in varying stages of
development, but basically it is not considered macho to eat one
without fully discernable feathers, beak, and claws. Some say these
crunchy bits are the best. Others prefer just to drink the so-called
’soup’, the vile, pungent liquid that surrounds the aforementioned
feathery fetus…excuse me; I have to go and throw up now. I’ll be
back in a minute.
Food dominates the life of the Filipino. People here just love to eat.
They eat at least eight times a day. These eight official meals are
called, in order: breakfast, snacks, lunch, merienda, pica-pica, pulutan,
dinner, and no-one-saw-me-take-that-cookie-from-the-fridge-so-it-doesn’t-count.
The short gaps in between these mealtimes are spent eating Sky Flakes
from the open packet that sits on every desktop. You’re never far from
food in the Philippines . If you doubt this, next time you’re driving
home from work, try this game. See how long you can drive without seeing
food and I don’t mean a distant restaurant, or a picture of food. I mean a
man on the sidewalk frying fish balls, or a man walking through the traffic
selling nuts or candy. I bet it’s less than one minute.
Here are some other things I’ve noticed about food in the Philippines .
Firstly, a meal is not a meal without rice - even breakfast. In the UK
, I could go a whole year without eating rice. Second, it’s impossible to
drink without eating. A bottle of San Miguel just isn’t the same without
gambas or beef tapa. Third, no one ventures more than two paces from their
house without baon and a container of something cold to drink. You
might as well ask a Filipino to leave home without his pants on. And lastly,
where I come from, you eat with a knife and fork. Here, you eat with a
spoon and fork. You try eating rice swimming in fish sauce with a
knife.
One really nice thing about Filipino food culture is that people always
ask you to SHARE their food. In my office, if you catch anyone attacking
their baon, they will always go, "Sir! KAIN TAYO!" ("Let’s eat!"). This
confused me, until I realized that they didn’t actually expect me to sit down
and start munching on their boneless bangus. In fact, the polite response
is something like, "No thanks, I just ate."
But the principle is sound - if you have food on your plate, you are
expected to share it, however hungry you are, with those who may be
even hungrier. I think that’s great. In fact, this is frequently even taken
one step further. Many Filipinos use "Have you eaten yet?" ("KUMAIN KA
NA?") as a general greeting, irrespective of time of day or location.
Some foreigners think Filipino food is fairly dull compared to other
Asian cuisines. Actually lots of it is very good: Spicy dishes like Bicol
Express (strange, a dish named after a train); anything cooked with coconut
milk; anything KINILAW; and anything ADOBO. And it’s hard to beat the sheer
wanton, cholesterolic frenzy of a good old-fashioned LECHON de leche
feast. Dig a pit, light a fire, add 50 pounds of animal fat on a stick,
and cook until crisp. Mmm, mmm… you can actually feel your arteries
constricting with each successive mouthful.
I also share one key Pinoy trait —a sweet tooth. I am thus the only
foreigner I know who does not complain about sweet bread, sweet
burgers, sweet spaghetti, sweet banana ketchup, and so on. I am a man
who likes to put jam on his pizza. Try it!
It’s the weird food you want to avoid. In addition to duck fetus in the
half-shell, items to avoid in the Philippines include pig’s blood soup
(DINUGUAN); bull’s testicle soup, the strangely-named "SOUP NUMBER
FIVE" (I dread to think what numbers one through four are); and the
ubiquitous, stinky shrimp paste, BAGOONG, and it’s equally stinky
sister, PATIS. Filipinos are so addicted to these latter items that they will
even risk arrest or deportation trying to smuggle them into countries like
Australia and the USA , which wisely ban the importation of items you
can smell from more than 100 paces.
Then there’s the small matter of the blue ice cream. I have never been
able to get my brain around eating blue food; the ubiquitous UBE leaves me
cold.
And lastly on the subject of weird food, beware: that KALDERETANG
KAMBING (goat) could well be KALDERETANG ASO (dog)…
The Filipino, of course, has a well-developed sense of food. Here’s a
typical Pinoy food joke: "I’m on a seafood diet. "What’s a seafood
diet?" "When I see food, I eat it!"
Filipinos also eat strange bits of animals — the feet, the head, the
guts, etc., usually barbecued on a stick. These have been given witty names,
like "ADIDAS" (chicken’s feet); "KURBATA" (either just chicken’s neck, or
"neck and thigh" as in "neck-tie"); "WALKMAN" (pigs ears); "PAL" (chicken
wings); "HELMET" (chicken head); "IUD" (chicken intestines), and BETAMAX"
(video-cassette-like blocks of animal blood). Yum, yum. Bon appetit.
"A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches" — (Proverbs
22:1)
WHEN I arrived in the Philippines from the UK six years ago, one of the
first cultural differences to strike me was names. The subject has
provided a continuing source of amazement and amusement ever since.
The first unusual thing, from an English perspective, is that everyone
here has a nickname. In the staid and boring United Kingdom , we have
nicknames in kindergarten, but when we move into adulthood we tend,
I am glad to say, to lose them.
The second thing that struck me is that Philippine names for both girls
and boys tend to be what we in the UK would regard as overbearingly cutesy
for anyone over about five. Fifty-five-year-olds colleague put it. Where I
come from, a boy with a nickname like Boy Blue or Honey Boy would be beaten
to death at school by pre-adolescent bullies, and never make it to
adulthood. So, probably, would girls with names like Babes, Lovely, Precious,
Peachy or Apples. Yuk, ech ech.
Here, however, no one bats an eyelid. Then I noticed how many people
have what I have come to call "door-bell names". These are nicknames that
sound like -well, doorbells. There are millions of them. Bing, Bong, Ding,
and Dong are some of the more common. They can be, and frequently are, used in
even more door-bell-like combinations such as Bing-Bong, Ding-Dong,
Ting-Ting, and so on. Even one of our senator has a doorbell named Ping.
None of these doorbell names exist where I come from, and hence sound
unusually amusing to my untutored foreign ear.
Someone once told me that one of the Bings, when asked why he was
called Bing, replied, "because my brother is called Bong". Faultless logic.
Dong, of course, is a particularly funny one for me, as where I come from
"dong" is a slang word for well; perhaps "talong" is the best Tagalog
equivalent.
Repeating names was another novelty to me, having never before
encountered people with names like Len-Len, Let-Let, Mai-Mai, or Ning-Ning. The
secretary I inherited on my arrival had an unusual one: Leck-Leck. Such
names are then frequently further refined by using the "squared"
symbol, as in Len2 or Mai2. This had me very confused for a while.
Then there is the trend for parents to stick to a theme when naming
their children. This can be as simple as making them all begin with the same
letter, as in Jun, Jimmy, Janice, and Joy.
More imaginative parents shoot for more sophisticated forms of
assonance or rhyme, as in Biboy, Boboy, Buboy, Baboy (notice the names get worse the
more kids there are-best to be born early or you could end up being a Baboy).
Even better, parents can create whole families of, say, desserts (Apple
Pie, Cherry Pie, Honey Pie) or flowers (Rose, Daffodil, Tulip). The main
advantage of such combinations is that they look great painted across your trunk
if you’re a cab driver. That’s another thing I’d never seen before coming to
Manila — taxis with the driver’s kids’ names on the trunk.
Another whole eye-opening field for the foreign visitor is the
phenomenon of the "composite" name. This includes names like Jejomar (for Jesus,
Joseph and Mary), and the remarkable Luzviminda (for Luzon , Visayas and
Mindanao, believe it or not). That’s a bit like me being called something like
"Engscowani" (for England , Scotland , Wales and Northern Ireland ).
Between you and me, I’m glad I’m not.
And how could I forget to mention the fabulous concept of the randomly
inserted letter ‘h’. Quite what this device is supposed to achieve, I
have not yet figured out, but I think it is designed to give a touch of
class to an otherwise only averagely weird name. It results in creations like
Jhun, Lhenn, Ghemma, and Jhimmy. Or how about Jhun-Jhun (Jhun2)?
How boring to come from a country like the UK full of people with names
like ohn Smith. How wonderful to come from a country where imagination
and exoticism rule the world of names.
Even the towns here have weird names; my favorite is the unbelievably
named town of Sexmoan (ironically close to Olongapo and Angeles). Where else
in the world could that really be true? Where else in the world could the
head of the Church really be called Cardinal Sin? Where else but the
Philippines!
Note: Philippines has a senator named Joker, and it is his legal
name
trying to happy in a mediocre a.k.a so-so life.. nothin’ much happened. except for one wish that came true.. that novena never really failed me.
